Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 

About: Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Religiosity & Religious identity. It has an ISSN identifier of 0021-8294. Over the lifetime, 3120 publications have been published receiving 132031 citations. The journal is also known as: JSSR.

Patterns of positive and negative religious coping with major life stressors.

Abstract: This study attempted to identify positive and negative patterns of religious coping methods, develop a brief measure of these religious coping patterns, and examine their implications for health and adjustment. Through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, positive and negative religious coping patterns were identified in samples of people coping with the Oklahoma City bombing, college students coping with major life stressors, and elderly hospitalized patients coping with serious medical illnesses. A 14-item measure of positive and negative patterns of religious coping methods (Brief RCOPE) was constructed. The positive pattern consisted of religious forgiveness, seeking spiritual support, collaborative religious coping, spiritual connection, religious purification, and benevolent religious reappraisal. The negative pattern was defined by spiritual discontent, punishing God reappraisals, interpersonal religious discontent, demonic reap praisal, and reappraisal of God's powers. As predicted, people made more use of the positive than the negative religious coping methods. Furthermore, the two patterns had different implications for health and adjustment. The Brief RCOPE offers an efficient, theoretically meaningful way to integrate religious dimensions into models and studies of stress, coping, and health.

Religion and Spirituality: Unfuzzying the Fuzzy

Abstract: The present study attempts to measure how individuals define the terms religiousness and spirituality, to measure how individuals define their own religiousness and spirituality, and to examine whether these definitions are associated with different demographic, religio/spiritual, and psychosocial variables. The complete sample of 346 individuals was composed of 11 groups of participants drawn from a wide range of religious backgrounds. Analyses were conducted to compare participants' self-rated religiousness and spirituality, to correlate self-rated religiousness and spirituality with the predictor variables, and to use the predictor variables to distinguish between participants who described themselves as spiritual and religious from those who identified themselves as 'spiritual but not religious. A content analysis of participants' definitions of religiousness and spirituality was also performed. The results suggest several points of convergence and divergence between the constructs religiousness and spirituality. The theoretical, empirical, and practical implications of these results for the scientific study of religion are discussed.

Risk and culture : an essay on the selection of technical and environmental dangers

Abstract: Can we know the risks we face, now or in the future? No, we cannot; but yes, we must act as if we do. Some dangers are unknown; others are known, but not by us because no one person can know everything. Most people cannot be aware of most dangers at most times. Hence, no one can calculate precisely the total risk to be faced. How, then, do people decide which risks to take and which to ignore? On what basis are certain dangers guarded against and others relegated to secondary status? This book explores how we decide what risks to take and which to ignore, both as individuals and as a culture.

Ritual : perspectives and dimensions

Abstract: From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still, few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors, much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly, because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet, in many ways, equally legitimate interpretations, ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book, Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual practice and its study; she surveys the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our understanding of ritualism. Bell refuses to nail down ritual with any one definition or understanding. Instead, her purpose is to reveal how definitions emerge and evolve and to help us become more familiar with the interplay of tradition, exigency, and self-expression that goes into constructing this complex social medium.

The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach

Abstract: This volume presents the most comprehnsive survey of the empirical literature on the psychology of religion available today. Like its predecesor, the second edition of The Psychology of Religion emphasises scientific work that is moving the psychology of religion into the mainstream of academic psychology, rather than the broad interpretive and conceptual discussions of religion. Ideally structured as a text, the volume's chapters each integrate findings according to theory or theories that best illuminate them, allowing instructors the flexibility to assign any or all of the chapters according to the design of their courses. Completely revised and updated, this second edition incorporates data on the impact of the family and schools into an expanded chapter on religious socialization, and also includes a new discussion of religion and coping. Throughout, the text is greatly enhanced by the wealth of empirical research that has been conducted during the past decade.